[Legbreaker]

And don't forget as I previously mentioned, WWII convoys often only had ONE warship as escort, usually an older WWI era destroyer (at least earlier on), and many times convoys sailed without any escorts at all. And that's when there were far more enemy vessels in the area than in T2K.

Without more modern munitions such as missiles and torpedoes, most warships are little more than floating targets. Yes, they still have .50 cal machineguns, GPMGs and (in some cases) they might be lucky enough to have a few rounds for a single 76mm gun. The launchers for the missiles etc may still be serviceable, but what good are they without the ammo? We also know torpedoes were scarce as only a handful could be scrounged up from the entire east coast area controlled by Milgov to arm the Los Angeles.

Submarines are clearly in very short supply (only two known to still exist in 2000, plus one French sub mentioned in "What's Polish for G'Day"), and airpower is virtually non-existent, so the only likely threats will be surface vessels after 1997. It may well be that the troop ships and cargo vessels sent by Civgov acted as their own escorts - just slap a TOW, AA gun, etc on the deck and you should be able to scare off most of the probable opponents.

As for the situation in the middle east, yes, there are some ships there being held for sea lift duties, but how often do they actually sail? How long does it take to produce enough fuel to supply them for not only the initial landing, but the continuing resupply operations for the troops on the ground?

Also, where are the munitions coming from to resupply them? Pretty sure there's no factories in the region churning out Harpoons, and there's certainly nothing coming from the US (or anywhere else for that matter, except MAYBE France - not that they'd be sharing).